My Country Tis of Thee

A bit of honest truth. I haven’t been sure how to sum up my feelings from the election. It’s already February 2017. Trump has been in office for about a month and is steamrolling our country towards a cliff it may not be able to avoid tumbling over. My anger towards asshole purists on the left who ate up the same bullshit lies about Hillary Clinton that the right has peddled in for so long has not abated. People who thought they were making some grand political statement voting for a third party candidate or staying home have not stopped pissing me off. Susan Sarandon is still full of shit. I really can’t read a lot of the political drivel that ends up on Medium these days. There’s a lot of places I could go here and we could go off the rails for a long while. Instead, I thought I’d tell a story.

I live in a very ethnically diverse blue collar town. My local polling place is at the local elementary school. It’s a consolidation of three voting districts in my town in the school’s gym. In the five years I’ve lived in my town, voting has been a mostly sedate affair (and yes, I vote every year. If only you Bernie Bros had that level of dedication). You’re in and out in only a few minutes. I think the longest I waited was for maybe three voters in line ahead of me in 2012. Voting in the Primary in June of last year was equally sedate. So, naturally, when I showed up to vote on Election Day, I expected the usual in and out speed of voting.

Imagine my surprise when, upon entering the gym where the voting happens, the line for my precinct was out the door. Seriously. I always hear those stories of people in big cities who wait for a long time to vote (especially when they’re in heavily Democratic cities in a state with a Republican leadership, because voter suppression and all). I’ve never actually had it happen to me.

And who was in line? A whole hell of a lot of minorities who suddenly had a very strong urge to exercise their voting rights. And, can you blame them? The candidate who won the election was advocating a policy of racial and religious purity. Scary words that whose fear has been proven since Trump’s inauguration. In a place where you can usually vote in under 10 minutes, it took over an hour to get the deed done. And this was with a hungry child who did not want to be held or wait this out (and why the one precinct worker who offered us pretzels for said hungry child was the real saint in this affair).

At the time, it was a bit annoying to have to wait this long, especially with the hungry kid. But when I think back on this, it matters a lot more. This is where the future of a progressive movement is. While the Bernie Bros want to keep the focus on white folks (and face it, this is the case), there are a lot of people who are just cutting their teeth on this forthcoming political movement. It’s easy to lose focus and backpedal where the Democrats need to go next. Looking at all these people get out and vote makes me hope they don’t lose sight of where life is taking us next.